Islam and the left

Dazed and confused

AS A child Nick Cohen was not allowed to eat oranges from South Africa (apartheid), Spain (Franco's fascism), Israel (occupation) or Florida (his mother detested Nixon). He grew up on the left and assumed that the left stood on the moral high ground. Now he feels betrayed. Events since September 11th 2001, and especially since the invasion of Iraq, have persuaded this British newspaper columnist that the left has been turned upside down. Almost everywhere, he says, leftists are likelier than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements. The failure of socialism has freed the left “to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America.”

The particular target of this wide-ranging polemic is the recent unholy alliance between left-wing movements in the West and the right-wing bigotry of Islamic extremism. Mr Cohen was dismayed after September 11th when British commentators hinted that America had “had it coming”. His own editor at the New Statesman wrote a pernicious editorial musing that the American bond traders who perished in the twin towers were less innocent than Vietnamese or Iraqi victims of terror because they lived in a democracy yet had chosen to vote for George Bush instead of Al Gore (although, as Mr Cohen observes, Osama bin Laden had declared war on America long before, when Bill Clinton was president).

The reaction to September 11th was bad enough. Worse came with the approach of the Iraq war. Mr Cohen was bemused at the anti-war protests around the world in February 2003, in which millions of supposedly liberal-minded people marched in order, as he puts it, “to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime”.

He concedes that a case could be made against the war on the grounds of legality, the human cost, unforeseen consequences and so forth. But few of the marchers seemed to take any account at all of the near-genocidal nature of Saddam's rule. Afterwards, moreover, even those who had opposed the war could have taken the side of Iraq's would-be democrats. The left chose instead to ennoble as a “resistance” the jihadists and Baathists who continue deliberately to slaughter thousands of civilians in the hope of creating a right-wing theocracy or restoring dictatorship.

It is, in the author's word, all disgraceful, and a profound betrayal of the values—anti-fascism and support for the underdog—which the mainstream left had at its best instinctively upheld. If Mr Cohen's aim is to discomfort the many whose self-righteous resentment of Mr Bush and Tony Blair has dulled their moral judgments, he succeeds brilliantly. He is less successful in explaining why they have reacted this way. Is it a scared refusal to see Islamist terrorism for the implacable, irrational enemy it is? Is it a deep-seated anti-Americanism? Whatever the cause, Mr Cohen predicts confusion ahead. “The time will soon come when the liberal-left's escape routes will close, George W. Bush, their bogeyman, will be gone and they will be all alone in a frightening world without the enemy who has defined them and held them together for so long.” You get the feeling that he can hardly wait.